Woke or Anti-Woke, You’re Both on the Right

It’s all a fight within the right. Italy’s woke/anti-woke debate is a family quarrel between two individualisms: the identitarian kind and the meritocratic kind, both heirs of Nozick more than of Marx.

Woke measures oppression by the self-perception of the individual: my identity, my lived experience, an ultimate criterion unverifiable by any authority outside the person who declares it. Mainstream anti-woke measures worth by the same principle, with the sign flipped: individual merit, personal responsibility, the freedom of the individual from collective constraint. What gets rewarded changes; the unit of measurement stays the same.

The class-based critique that should dismantle both positions already exists, in books: Walter Benn Michaels wrote it back in 2006, arguing that identity politics displaces class analysis and, in doing so, serves the very neoliberalism it claims to fight. That critique has no real political representation in Italy: no party, no movement has made it their banner in public debate over the past several years.

To demonstrate this, one has to start from where woke — what Yascha Mounk calls the identity synthesis — betrayed its own sources, and show that the betrayal leads, at every step, to the same destination: the sovereign individual, the shared home of two sides that believe themselves opponents.

Foucault describes power as relational: in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I, it runs through every social relation, produces subjects rather than merely repressing them, and implicates even whoever happens, at a given moment, to occupy the dominant position. A network model, in which no position is fixed once and for all.

Woke borrows this model’s vocabulary and turns it into something else. Whiteness, patriarchy, privilege become fixed substances, possessed by birth by one group and imposed on another: the very oppressor/oppressed binary that Foucauldian genealogy was built to dismantle. Susan Neiman makes this argument from the left, in Left Is Not Woke (2023): the Enlightenment universalism that historical progressivism once claimed has been replaced by an identitarian tribalism that usurped its name, inheriting the vocabulary while losing the method.

The second betrayal concerns political positioning. Woke presents itself as heir to twentieth-century left politics, the kind that thought about rights starting from the collective — class, unions, welfare. But the criterion it applies in practice to judge what counts as oppression is the subjective experience of the individual, verifiable only by whoever declares it. This is the logical structure of Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): self-ownership, the self as absolute and unquestionable property, the philosophical foundation of American libertarianism — the very political tradition that woke, by calling itself an heir of the left, ought to reject.

Alasdair MacIntyre had already anticipated the ground on which this criterion would take root. In After Virtue (1981), he describes the collapse of a shared moral tradition, which leaves the individual as sole arbiter of their own worth: every ethical judgment is reduced to an expression of subjective preference, with no external criterion left to measure it against. Yascha Mounk, in The Identity Trap (2023), follows the same thread to the present: the postmodernism that once denied universal truths becomes, generation after generation, today’s identity synthesis, in which self-perception replaces shared criteria as the foundation of public judgment.

The result is a paradox woke does not recognize as its own. It claims collectivity in its language and applies individualism in its method: every identity group becomes, in effect, the sum of its members’ subjective perceptions. The material interests that should hold it together as a political subject are left out of the account — the same account that anti-woke, from the opposite shore, leaves out in turn.

The Third Betrayal

The first two betrayals lie in method: woke borrows Foucault and inverts his model, applies Nozick’s logic while claiming the inheritance of the twentieth-century left. It remains inside the house of the sovereign individual — the same house it shares with the side it calls its opponent.

The third betrayal shows up in the facts, and it’s the one with the most verifiable consequences: the cost woke imposes on the institutions that have embraced it, well before it ever arrived in Italy.

In the Anglophone academic world from which the Italian debate imports much of its own vocabulary, the mechanism has already produced documented cases with names and circumstances attached. Kathleen Stock, a philosopher, resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 after months of pressure over positions on biological sex deemed heterodox. Selina Todd, a historian at Oxford, has had to be accompanied by security at her own lectures. Alice Sullivan, a sociologist at University College London, was removed from a public event through no-platforming. The pattern also shows up in aggregate: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has tracked these cases at American universities since 2015, recorded a jump from 24 sanction attempts that year to 113 in 2020, with more than half of the censorious pressure coming from the left of the targeted scholar, according to the report published in 2023.

In Italy the phenomenon arrives already filtered through bureaucracy. Nearly every major university — Bologna, Turin, Genoa, the Catholic University, among others — has produced an official inclusive-language document in recent years, complete with dedicated committees, before the academic community had even debated the matter on its merits. The identity category enters as an object of administrative regulation before it becomes an object of public debate.

On the political level, the mechanism from the previous point has an applied case. When a party replaces the collective interest — welfare, jobs, regional development — with identity recognition as the priority terrain of its own public discourse, it loses the criterion by which its traditional electorate used to measure representation. Italy’s Democratic Party, which governed fifteen out of twenty regions in 2015, governs three today: a finding consistent with Benn Michaels’s thesis, and the only aggregate data available to measure eleven years of that choice.

The most recent case comes from the United States, and it is verifiable name by name. In July 2026, Melissa Chaudhry, a Democratic congressional candidate in Washington State, removed her support for LGBTQ rights from her campaign website so as not to alienate the Muslim electorate of her district — she admitted as much herself. It fits into an already-documented pattern: after the 2024 defeat, Newsom, Moulton, and Suozzi publicly softened their positions on trans rights, defending the move as an electoral calculation.

In Italy the picture is more blurred but points in the same direction. In Venice’s 2026 municipal elections, the Democratic Party fielded seven candidates from the Bengali community, in an operation explicitly aimed at an electorate organized around local mosques. The party lost the city anyway, 39.4 percent to 50.7 percent, and the ethnic-targeted slate performed below the party’s own local average. There are no polls specific to that electorate to isolate a single cause. The reading most consistent with the rest of this piece remains interpretive: a party built on individual self-perception as the ultimate criterion — woke — and an electoral bloc that identifies with a moral order opposed to individual self-determination remain, structurally, incompatible. The pursuit of consensus on the right and on the left runs through the same compromise: staying silent on rights that one’s traditional electorate once considered non-negotiable.

Here the circle closes. Woke and anti-woke quarrel over the sovereign individual while both, when electoral calculation demands it, sacrifice the same ground — the rights of sexual minorities — to chase a bloc of votes that does not recognize that ground at all. The convenience of the moment decides, always, inside the same house.